The Culture Ministry will decide whether Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Lady with an Ermine, a delicate condition, is fit to be out on a prolonged tour of Europe’s galleries next week.

The Czartoryski Foundation, which owns the work, wants to show it at three major exhibitions – in Madrid, Berlin and London.

Permission had already been granted to show the picture at the National Gallery in London from 9 November to 4 February 2012.

A secretary of state at the Ministry of Culture has said that if taken to Madrid and Berlin as well, the Leonardo masterpiece would spend nine months away from Poland. According to the chief conservator of the National Museum in Kraków, Lady with an Ermine should undergo further research studies and should not travel to foreign exhibitions.

The German minister of culture has written a letter to his Polish counterpart asking him for permission to show the painting in Berlin at an exhibition of Renaissance portrait starting on 25 August.

Lady with an Ermine is currently in Warsaw. The Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, where it is part of the permanent exhibit, is now undergoing a thorough refurbishment.

Lady with an Ermine is one of Leonardo da Vinci’s twenty extant works and one of his four female portraits. It depicts Cecilia Gallerani, a young lady who entered the Milanese court around 1490 and became a mistress of the Duke Lodovico Sforza and the mother of his son. It was the Duke who commissioned Leonardo to paint the portrait. (mk)